The Lost Life

The screening emerges from the documentation of the jacquard weaving process for the grayscale portraits of the suicide deceased, with the peculiar mechanical sound emanating from the loom, a juxtaposition of sound and image. The film documents the production process of a series of 39 Jacquard portraits (an individual portrait for each of the suicide-deceased whose families had donated a photographic image), each individual portrait film being three minutes in duration.. They begin with images of the Jacquard loom in operation – the reeds on the digital looms, the shuttle moving back and forth, in real time. The image freezes, moving at the speed of production. It suddenly stops, the mechanical shuttle suspends for a moment, and then resumes. The first name and age of the deceased begins to appear, as the shuttle spindles back and forth bringing the face of the person into existence, and eventually fading away into a black screen.